of Pentecostal faith-healing, in a tongue-in-cheek sceptical way. He gets audience members with physical complaints to come on stage, then ‘heals’ them with the Holy Spirit, while acting like a flamboyant revivalist preacher. It’s pretty offensive to Christians, but the weird thing is, it works. Brown tells me: ‘Not only does the healing work, but I’ve also “slain” people, so they fall down.’ I witnessed this when I saw Brown’s show – it was very strange to see sceptical Londoners abruptly pass out, then queue up to testify to how much better they felt. After the show, Twitter was full of testimonies – ‘It was incredible! Thanks for healing my feet’; ‘Thank you for healing my back’; ‘My legs started to buckle and I wet myself.’ When the show was screened a few months later, the papers were full of similar miracle stories: ‘Girl who suffered knee problems for 10 years claims Brown miraculously healed her in 10 seconds,’ said The Sun. ‘Derren Brown has god-like powers,’ declared the girl in question. It shows that just because a person can produce ecstatic experiences in others, it doesn’t mean they’re blessed with spiritual gifts. Such experiences seem more triggered by a person’s expectations than by the spiritual powers of the guru.12 But the response to Miracle also shows how healing ecstatic experiences can be - they unlock subliminal healing and give people the faith to believe a new narrative.
A few weeks after the show, I met Nicky Gumbel and asked him if some religious experiences are really ‘just’ hypnosis. On the Alpha course, when he told us ‘You may be feeling dizzy, or have sweaty palms or a warmth in your chest’, wasn’t that just hypnotic suggestion?
He said: ‘Someone once said the same thing to me on the Alpha course. So the next Alpha weekend, I didn’t say anything about what people might feel, and there were very powerful manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and someone came up to me afterwards and said, “Why didn’t you warn us?” So what I try to say now is “These things don’t need to happen, but if they do, that’s okay, it’s not wrong or weird.” The point I try to emphasise is, that’s not what matters.’ He suggested there are three possibilities about religious experiences: either it’s demonic, or psychological, or God. Or it could be a combination, particularly of the last two. ‘What matters,’ Nicky insisted, ‘is the fruit. If it leads to a ministry for Alpha in the prisons, I think that was God. If it leads to people coming off heroin, that was probably God. And if it was just psychological, maybe we need more of the psychological. When John Wimber came here, and a lot of friends of mine said, “What he’s doing is a well-known form of hypnosis”, I repeated this to my predecessor, and he replied, “Not well-enough known.”’
This is remarkably close to William James’s view of the matter: it may be God, it may be hypnosis, what matters is the fruit. Even secular psychologists arrived at similar conclusions. The psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot initially pathologised religious experience, but his last essay on ‘the faith cure’ looked at Lourdes as a ‘system of mass suggestion’, which he admitted was often very healing.13 Religious healing may just be the well-proven placebo effect – but what ‘the placebo effect’ means is people’s expectations, beliefs and faith can have an extraordinary impact on the body, which can be triggered by ritual and role-play. So do we need the mass placebo of religious ritual to bring us healing, love and transcendence?
Set and setting
I know many of my atheist and agnostic friends were worried I’d joined a cult when I got into HTB. But I’d suggest it’s our secular individualist culture that’s weird in not providing ‘controlled spaces to lose control’ – places and rituals where people can come together to love each other, support each other, pray for each other, and dissolve their egos safely. That lack is unique in the history of Homo sapiens. Of course, there are risks in such places – one can lose one’s mind, get exploited by a guru, or end up turning against outsiders. In the Introduction I suggested that Timothy Leary’s idea of ‘set and setting’ are a good way to assess the risks of different contexts for ecstasy.
If we think about the ‘mindset’ of Anglican churches, in many ways they look a lot safer and more pro-social than other forms of contemporary ecstasy. Charismatic Christians engage with the Holy Spirit not for the thrill of it, not just to get high, but out of a sense of love of God, love of each other, and desire to help humanity. They’re fairly humble in their mindset: they’re so focused on worshipping Jesus that they avoid the risk of trying to be gods themselves. And the ecstasy is outward-looking; it’s channelled towards trying to improve society. Although charismatic Christians sometimes think the best way to improve society is by converting other people to Christianity, they’ve helped in other ways: a group of young HTB lawyers campaigned to pass the Modern Slavery Act (which gives police more powers against human traffickers), just as Methodists and Quakers worked to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century.
The main risk with the mindset of charismatic Christianity is that it can be over-attached to ecstasy. This is a risk in the whole of Christian culture, all the way back to the early church (St Paul warns against getting over-attached to charismatic gifts in 1 Corinthians). Christian ecstasy is a visitation from the Holy Spirit, proof of God’s love for you, an influx of charismatic power. It could bring healing, or children, or career opportunities. It could be proof you’re saved and going to Heaven. It could even be a sign of the coming Rapture. How could one not get attached to ecstasy with all these marvellous interpretations? Particularly when your community seizes on your experience and grants you status because of it. The flip-side of over-attachment to ecstasy is that people who don’t go into trance states wonder why God’s not into them. And people like me, who have experienced ecstatic moments, end up feeling confused and depressed when the ecstasy departs. We can easily end up chasing it.
The setting of Anglicanism
In terms of the ‘setting’ of charismatic Christianity, there are, of course, risks to churches as a place of collective trance. As Derren Brown notes, Pentecostal preachers are highly adept at hypnotising their congregations into giving them money. Forbes magazine estimates the combined worth of five Nigerian Pentecostal pastors at $200 million. Two American Pentecostal pastors attracted ridicule recently when they explained they needed private jets so they could spend more time with God.14 Church leaders may use their hypnotic influence to increase, then abuse, their power. This is a big problem in some of the Pentecostal ‘house churches’ now booming around the world, where priests have unchecked power. I interviewed one woman who described how she had suffered ‘spiritual abuse’ for 14 years in a London Pentecostal church, under a tyrannical pastor and his wife. She told me: ‘The mind control was very extreme. They’d say the Lord had given them power to come into our houses in the spirit, meaning their spirits would leave their bodies and watch what we were doing in the privacy of our homes.’ Many Pentecostal churches are also profoundly patriarchal and homophobic.
The Anglican Church seems relatively protected against these risks. Its priests are as poor as church mice, they have to report to superiors and, unlike Catholic priests, they can get married, which is a good, though not sure-fire, protection against sexual abuse. Anglicans have a healthy sense of priests’ fallibility (as Denis Thatcher once said to his priest before a sermon, ‘Padre, most of us know what the Sermon on the Mount is. Twelve minutes is your lot’). HTB has resisted becoming a cultish mega-church partly because Nicky insisted on remaining within the Anglican communion rather than splitting off into an ecstatic sect, like the Quakers or Methodists. He’s avoided the lure of becoming a guru, despite his global fame. He still cycles to church and is nicknamed Humble Gumbel. HTB is not a cult: it doesn’t try to prevent people leaving; it doesn’t try to get all your money; it is open to criticism. I’m grateful to Nicky and his church for being so kind and welcoming to me, and still feel love for the community.
However, HTB’s methods for soul-farming can feel somewhat industrial. It runs three Alpha courses
